The apostles’ flight at the time of Jesus’ arrest is usually explained by fear and cowardice. Yet we have no reason to think that they were all so cowardly; at least, the Gospel accounts do not bear this out. Quite the contrary: some of them, Peter foremost among them, were very determined. Peter, for instance, when the Teacher was arrested...
The apostles’ flight at the time of Jesus’ arrest is usually explained by fear and cowardice. Yet we have no reason to think that they were all so cowardly; at least, the Gospel accounts do not bear this out. Quite the contrary: some of them, Peter foremost among them, were very determined. Peter, for instance, reached for his sword when the Teacher was arrested, and had Jesus approved this impulse, the other disciples, if not all then most, might well have joined him. The apostles were ready for an uprising and for war, ready to fight in defence of their Teacher, and ready to die for Him in that war.
The problem was that no war lay ahead. Jesus did not intend to fight; He did not even intend to defend Himself against those who had come to arrest Him. The messianic war for which the apostles had inwardly been preparing existed only in their imagination. They had been preparing for one thing, but something entirely different actually happened to them, and in such a situation a spiritual breakdown is not only possible, but almost inevitable.
More precisely, its inevitability depends on how deeply a person is immersed in their imagined reality, on how much, or conversely how comparatively little, spiritual effort they expend on living within it. For the disciples, the picture of the messianic war they had drawn was so real that they could not even imagine any other course of events. Peter reaches for his sword precisely because his picture of reality allows only one possible course of action in the situation that has arisen. Yet Jesus acts quite differently, not as the apostles expect.
This is where they lose their bearings: what, indeed, is left for soldiers to do when their commander not only makes no attempt to resist, but, absolutely voluntarily, surrenders himself? Surrender with him? It is an absurdity their minds cannot accommodate. The reality the apostles have constructed collapses before their eyes, and they flee, because in such a situation there is nothing else left for them to do. Jesus, however, seeing their spiritual condition, had already been certain at the Last Supper that this was how it would happen. In a fallen world, it is all so understandable, so human.
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14:43 Mat 26:47; Luk 22:47; Joh 18:2.
14:44 Whomsoever I shall kiss - Probably our Lord, in great condescension, had used (according to the Jewish custom) to permit his disciples to do this, after they had been some time absent.
14:47 Mat 26:51; Luk 22:49; Joh 18:10.
14:51 A young man - It does not appear, that he was one of Christ's disciples. Probably hearing an unusual noise, he started up out of his bed, not far from the garden, and ran out with only the sheet about him, to see what was the matter. And the young men laid hold on him - Who was only suspected to be Christ's disciple: but could not touch them who really were so.